This invention, in general, relates to sending and receiving short messages between wireless telephony users. More particularly, this invention relates to voice short message service (SMS) messaging using standard methods of recipient addressing as used by text SMS messaging.
In addition to the usual wireless telephony that cellular telephones provide, such devices are also widely used for sending short message service (SMS) messages between wireless users.
More recently new devices and supporting network services are being introduced that allow a more general class of messages to be sent between the wireless devices, where the messages include voice, still images, and even moving images. One of the prevalent services used today, besides text SMS messaging, is voice SMS messaging.
The existing methods of voice SMS messaging employ a mobile station integrated services digital network (MSISDN) number of the recipient's mobile device to send voice SMS messages. These methods require a sender to input the recipient's address through a user input interface. The current methods of text SMS messaging may use the addresses stored on the user's mobile device or the addresses manually entered by the user for addressing the text messages. The recipient address may be stored in the mobile device's native address book or on the subscriber identity module (SIM) card in the mobile device. However, the existing methods for voice SMS messaging do not allow the sender to practically use addresses stored in a local address book in the mobile device for selecting the recipients.
In view of the foregoing discussion, there is a need for a method and system for sending voice SMS messages to recipients, using recipients' addresses stored in an address book. The method and system must overcome the limitation of a user input requirement for addressing the recipients of the voice SMS messages.